Democracy Without Politics

LYME, N.H. — The scene: town meeting day. The agenda: articles and ordinances, warrant items and budgets. The plan (unchanged since the days when people arrived on horseback): to debate and vote on matters of concern to citizens.

In our town of about 1,700 people, more than 300 gathered in the school, juggling ballots, babies, needlework projects and plates of Thai food. In the days before the meeting, we’d received three pieces of paper mail, one urging us to vote against a zoning proposal, the other against rerouting a road, and the third introducing a candidate for the position of tax collector (salary: $10,110).

Our email inboxes, though, were stuffed. Our town listserve is usually a glorious cacophony of items for sale (dish set, child’s cross-country skis), requests for rides (“anyone going to Logan Saturday morning?”) and announcements of interest (“Brown Bag Lunch discussion of tick-borne diseases”). The online debate about the meeting had been fierce. This year’s votes mattered. But then, I can’t remember a year when they didn’t.

I walked in a little late, just in time to vote — aye — on a new road grader ($329,700). Then we turned to the rerouting debate. A piece of what had been a through-road had been washed out in a storm, leaving around 40 families on the wrong side. To get to them, emergency vehicles and the school bus had to take a detour through the next town. The proposal to reroute the road involved a substantial sum of money and the taking, by eminent domain, of land belonging to a farmer who strongly opposed the whole thing.

Speakers identified themselves by name and address. If they were new in town (a matter of some 10 years or less) they added an identifying phrase (“the old Hano house”) to clarify. There were slides, there were questions, there was some humor. Those opposed to the rerouting said it would disturb a wildlife corridor; a property owner on the wrong side declared that he was “wild, alive and in need of a corridor.”

To figure out where you stood on the issue, you had a few options. You could read the arguments in your various mailboxes. You could bring it up at school trivia night, maybe, and hear what people thought. Or you could make a gut call. Those are valid ways people decide things.

Here’s what you couldn’t do: You couldn’t rely on some vaguely understood, loudly articulated party line. There was no conservative or liberal, no Republican or Democratic side to the road rerouting debate. There was just a problem that a community needed to resolve.

Americans are fond of saying that all politics is local, but the thing is, when it’s local, it’s not “politics” at all — at least not as we’ve come to understand it. That $329,700 road grader? I could figure out to the penny what part of it I paid for. And every time our dirt road frost-heaves itself into disastrous lumps next winter, I’ll know it was worth it. But our friends on the paved part of the road? Maybe they thought we could live without a new grader.

That’s the way it goes in a small town. The money comes in — from taxes, mostly, although in 2015 we apparently made $169.50 from the use of the town copy machine. And the money goes out — salt for the roads, fire truck maintenance, toner. You can count it, feel it.

Many of the people who were surprised by the result of the last national election have invested considerable time in trying to understand the differences in opinion that led up to it. They’ve read, debated and posted about how little Americans understand one another. But you’re far more likely to learn about the ways people who share any community can differ if you leave your laptop at home and go to the equivalent of your local town meeting. New Hampshire’s brand of direct democracy may be rare outside of New England, but there are neighborhood associations, school boards, City Councils and public hearings all across the country.

You may think “we’re all pretty much alike here in my part of the bubble.” But you’re not. You don’t all have school-aged children, you don’t all live on a dirt road, some of you are on the wrong side of the washed-out culvert. Those differences force us to ask the small questions that are also the big questions, the ones that help us figure out what connects us together as a town or a state or a country. What do we owe our neighbors? How do we value that which is not of direct value to us? Who gets to decide? The answers aren’t color-coded in red or blue.

You learn pretty quickly that if you don’t treat every washed-out road as though it were your own, you may not like what happens when it is.

The rerouting of the road passed, by a vote of 161 to 148. So there will be a road, there will not be farmland, this time. Next time, there will be another debate.

KJ Dell’Antonia is a freelance writer and former columnist and editor for The Times’s Well Family.